Twitter Ads Increase Movie Ticket Sales

In the last few years, Twitter ads have become a big part of the promotion of major film productions on social media. Whether with organic or paid activities Twitter is big on film. Some recent new movie marketing research shows us just how much.

It seems that movie studios really do prefer Twitter when promoting their latest creations. In the last year alone, over 400 films had an official Twitter handle. In the same year, there were over 165 million movie-related Tweets around the world. Now, new marketing research shows that Twitter Ads have a pretty big impact on ticket sales as well.

400 films had official Twitter handles in 2015. Also, there were over 165m movie-related Tweets

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To conduct the research Twitter commissioned analytics company, MarketShare. The study — a Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) study for film releases in the US and Canada — was designed to understand sales impacts by different media channels. Comedy and action genres were studied because they were the top box office performers from December 2011 to June 2015 (the period of the study).

So, paid Twitter campaigns were compared to other media — radio, online display, and print ads — as revenue drivers. Promoted Videos were not included in the study as they weren’t launched until August 2014. The first insight from the study is that ROI is boosted with Twitter Ads and TV ads support each other.

In the US and Canada, ROI increased 16% on average for TV campaigns that had support from Twitter Ads. Comedies saw a 24% increase, whereas action movies saw an 11% increase in ROI.

After evaluating return on advertising spending (ROAS) the study found that paid Twitter campaigns impacted it “by a factor of two to three times” compared to other channels. With regards to ROAS, the study concluded that,

[quote]Compared to the average of all other advertising methods — including radio, print, online display, paid search, out of home (OOH), and TV — Twitter’s ROAS was 3.5 times more efficient at driving movie ticket sales domestically.[/quote]

Overall, Twitter as a channel – paid and earned – contributed to 8.9% of movie ticket sales during the last 4 years. In Canada, this was 7.2% of ticket sales, whereas in the US this was 13% for action movie ticket sales and 9.6% for comedy movie ticket sales.

Paid and and earned Twitter ads work together to account for 8.9% of movie ticket sales

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Twitter is clearly great for advertising movies, either on its own, or supporting TV advertising. And it certainly boosts the sale of movie tickets! If you would like to find out more about this study click here.